Original content and news about the autism epidemic from the perspective that autism is treatable. Anaylsis of current media treatment of autism and the environmental causes of autism.

Thanks to Jeannette Bishop for this unofficial text of Posey remarks on U.S. House floor: TO BEGIN WITH, I AM ABSOLUTELY, RESOLUTEY PRO-VACCINE. Advancements in medical immunization have saved countless lives and greatly benefitted public health. That being said, it's...

Part 2: Frau Koma's Second Coming: Mass Murder, Autism and the Cult of Weaponized Genetics

"No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's
cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids
look and look and look at all those X's..."
"And?""No damn cat, and no damn cradle." ~Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

By Adriana Gamondes

In the introduction to Nuclear Rites,
Stanford anthropologist Hugh Gusterson explains why he approached a formal
study of atomic weapons scientists in the same manner he’d approach a tribal
culture: “one powerful Western institution that is particularly understudied by
anthropologists is science.”

Gusterson concludes that, though
typical psychological analyses of weapons production bear some truth—that the
power of nuclear weapons systems become an extension of the self, an expression
of potency,etc.—the view too easily dismisses scientists’ own rationalizations
and ideology as mere distractions from driving psychosexual motives. Instead,
according to Gusterson, scientists’ faith in the ultimate morality of their
work and the fact that this stems from the problems they’re charged with
solving (namely the belief that winning the arms race would prevent nuclear strikes
by less evolved nations) might better explain the field’s euphemization
of risks, romanticization of their technology and exaggerated
self-assurance that this technology can be controlled even in the face of
repeated human error and equipment malfunction
potentially costing the lives of millions. Gusterson discusses profit
mostly as it pertains to scientific status, coveted name-rights and the ritual
of “initiation and transcendence” involved in creation and testing.

The word “profit” is derived from the
Latin profectus—“to gain, advance or progress.“ There are a variety of
interweaving gains to be made in ventures that are perceived to advance
humanity in the name of progress—money is only one of them. Gusterson quotes Robert
Budwine, head of the USA Delegation and director of Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory:

The United States, for all our manifest
faults, is without a doubt the best hope for a future world of peace and
prosperity… Weapons research simply must continue at a determined and intensive
level for our nation to have the opportunity to lead humankind towards some
future utopian world order.

Several of Gusterson’s works begin with
a quote from E.L. Doctorow: “The bomb first was our weapon. Then it became our
diplomacy. Next it became our economy. Now it’s become our culture. We’ve
become the people of the bomb.”

“To the victor go the spoils” has a
different meaning in that sense. Gusterson also points out in The Insecure American that by becoming
terrifying on the path to progress—even if this is rationalized, as it always
has been, as the conscious pursuit of the “greater good”—we’ve terrified
ourselves. Fear sells, but we’re the chief consumers of it.

Every social policy which requires the
cover of morality and pursuit of a shining future to rationalize human and
ecological collateral is now framed as a “war” on some frightening specter or
other: the war on terror, the war on disease, the war on street drugs, and the
war on mental illness (providing the sanctioned replacement for street
drugs). Some are beginning to recognize that whenever the “war on” prefix
is attached to any problem, whatever the “war” has been declared on will
expand.

In one sense, the pharmaceutical
juggernaut in the US plays the role of military medical corpsmen, culling the
wounded from the battle fields of various ideological and actual wars. When
commercial distractions fail to dull anxiety over an increasingly surveilled,
controlled and body-scanned society and worsening economies, ecology and human
health statistics, even those who remain relatively unaffected by the fallout
might blame their own or their children’s mental defects and reach for the
pills in an attempt to bring thoughts and feelings in line with perceived
norms.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “I am
ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions.” As social animals, it’s psychologically
painful for most people to feel out of step with context. By the same
principle, as the new norm becomes a medicated state, it may be increasingly
painful to work out life’s woes without chemical aid if no one else is doing
it, especially when normal emotional responses to life challenges such as grief and concern over illness are creeping out of
the margins of the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and being
turned into full blown clinical mental illnesses with corresponding
pharmaceutical “cures.” E.L. Doctorow could easily have written, “Drugs
first were our weapons. Then they became our diplomacy. Next they became our
economy. Now they’ve become our culture. We’ve become the people of the drugs.”

We’ve also become the people of the
side effects. Psychiatrist, drug expert and Pharmageddon author David Healy explains how tobacco science keeps prescription
drugs off the media list of causal conjectures for modern increases in violence
and suicides and how, in turn, social denial sustains itself on denialist
science. He calls the research fudging a “Doubt is our Product” strategy
once used by tobacco companies to hijack statistics on rising life expectancy
in the 1970’s as proof that smoking is safe.

…most of us know people on
antidepressants none of whom are violent. This makes it difficult to
accept a link to prescription drugs. For many even raising the idea that
Holmes may have been crazed by a prescription medicine is likely to sound
deranged or the excuse of a bleeding heart liberal.

But in fact there is a great deal of
publicly available clinical trial (Hammad 2004, p40-41) and
other data highlighting the risks of violence from psychotropic
drugs. There is far more hidden data. There is in fact no other area of
medicine in which there is so much hidden data on a risk that has consequences
for the lives of so many innocent third parties…

In the case of violence, the published
trials show antidepressants cause it, probably at a greater rate than alcohol,
cannabis, cocaine or speed would be linked to violence if put through the same
trial protocols that brought the antidepressants on the market. The labels for
the drugs in a number of countries say the drugs cause violence. And there is
at least one clear and well-known factor, just like autopsy rates, that can
account for the findings – young men. Violence is linked to young men, and
episodes of lethal violence are falling in all countries where the numbers of
young men are declining.

Shortly after Healy’s article was
published, a study in the The American Journal of Public Health reporting
that suicides now outnumbers car accidents. The old adage about
suicide is that violence turned inward may often turn out.

Does the drug industry fear that, if it
were known certain prescription drugs could lead formerly average individuals
to commit deadly acts, survivors would accuse industry of providing a
justification/alibi for perpetrators? Probably not. Drug makers more likely
fear being held accountable as perpetrators in high profile crimes. It’s hardly
out of concern for victims that industry favors the message that med madness is
merely an empty defense to avoid prosecution, which is why pharmaceutical
giants have repeatedly offered and provided free legal
resources to prosecutors to combat the use of the “Prozac
defense” by defendants even when survivors and surviving family members felt
defendants’ prescription drug use played a role.

Pharmaceutical companies have been
fined a record $11 billion over the past 3 years for unethical and illegal
practices. But leading researchers says companies will carry on breaking the
law, regarding fines as “the cost of doing business.”

Eight out of 10 of the biggest
pharmaceutical producers in the world have been caught breaking the law in this
period. All in all 26 healthcare companies have signed “corporate integrity
agreements” with US authorities, a form of probation following serious fraud.

Industry might easily absorbs the
litigious “cost of doing business” but it still fears a reverse profit slide
from corrected public perception of risk/benefit ratio. Accordingly, while the Times
plays hero by reporting coercive drugging practices and certain drug injuries,
industry embedded media doesn’t consistently disclose the science associating
violence to the medications, the counter-evidence to the idea that the drugs correct brain chemical
imbalance or that the drugs haveno proven clinical efficacy beyond functioning
as chemical straight-jackets, providing limited seizure control or temporary
psychic and sometimes physical painkilling properties.

Painkillers may have a place in
medicine; but the problem for marketing strategy is they can’t be mandated and
practitioners who overprescribe can face criminal charges. Since
court-mandated drugging is largely based on efficacy theory—the idea that these
drugs essentially “fix” the brain in order to improve cognitive functioning or
reduce violent behavior— and since forced drugging in institutions, foster care
and prisons and drugging as a condition of receiving social services or
Medicaid (effectively forced) represent a large chunk of the
psychopharmaceutical market— this explains the need for tobacco science to
argue clinical benefits, from fake studies of “brain chemical imbalance correction”
to genetic theories of mental illness.

Since Senator Grassley began his
investigations of pharmaceutical marketing and research fraud, regulatory and
industry cover-up and academic capitulation, the public has become slightly
more aware of the body of research questioning drug safety. But if information
is power, the public remains crucially disempowered. Some individuals, for
example, may choose to avoid drugs as a personal choice because their evolving
awareness of risk reports outweighed the seriousness of their own complaints.
But the same individuals might nevertheless believe public safety could be
compromised if certain other people weren’t forced to take medication,
particularly since only a few independent investigative journalists like Evelyn Pringle have resisted industry pressure to
withhold key facts which might change the assumptions.

According to Pringle, the pyramid of
front groups set up and funded by psychiatric drug makers over the past 25
years have made it nearly impossible to educate the public about the serious
adverse effects associated with psychotropic drugs, particularly suicide and
violence.

Like members of many prominent industry
front groups which began as consumer non-profits, local NAMI chapter members
may be largely ignorant of NAMI’s history and driving policies. NAMI’s members
may claim to be working for internal change, though that change has not been
forthcoming in the 33 years the group has existed. Despite pleas of benign
intent, NAMI has managed to attach itself and its medication/forced treatment
models to criminal, juvenile and family court systems and law enforcement
nationwide. NAMI is also officially sanctioned and has also been slated by
compromised National Institute of Mental Health director Tom Insel
as one of only two “consumer partners” of the NIMH, along with another industry
front group, Mental Health America
(formerly the National Mental Health Association). The NIMH itself has long
been identified as an industry-captured regulatory body which maintains a “revolving door” employment exchange
with pharmaceutical companies which share board members with mainstream media
corporations and collectively rank next to fast food and the automotive
industry for ad spending.

Senator Grassley’s investigation of
these “charity” organizations which Pringle participated in verified that their
budgets are largely supported by money from drug companies – “results that
sadly got very little coverage in the MSM— leaving the public unsuspecting of
the underlying motives of all these so-called ‘patient advocacy groups,’” she
warns.

In return for the massive funding,
Pringle reports that front groups have done a great deal to protect psych drugs
profits over the years:

For instance, their leaders have showed
up at every single FDA advisory meeting held to decide whether to add warnings
about suicide and violence to the labels of antidepressants and testified
against adding the warnings. And every year, the groups recruit family members
and friends of suicide victims in communities all over the US to unwittingly
participate in drug marketing schemes disguised as ‘suicide prevention’ walks
and programs without ever mentioning that the majority of people who commit
suicide are already on the medications the schemes are aimed at selling that
cause people to become suicidal.

Year after year they recruit using the
same old phony lines. Family members and friends are told to be on the look-out
for loved ones who might be depressed – people are committing suicide because
not enough are getting treatment - which translates into drugs, drugs and
more drugs only.

The MSM actually helps the groups
promote these blatant drug peddling schemes with public service
announcements…Obviously because their budgets are also so overly dependent on
Big Pharma advertising dollars.

If money is only one “gain” to be had
in pushing the drug paradigm, it’s a big one. But Pringle can easily attest how
drugs have become our culture and how the public and scientific authorities
alike are turned into psychiatric “informants” through disinformation and the
cultural currency of fear, faith in progress and the universal need to believe
that the devil wears horns.

And the culture-capture doesn’t stop at
the 6 o’clock news. Cannes nominated film We Need to
Talk About Kevin tells the now overly familiar story of
an empathy-impaired-from-birth mass murdering teen with a curious resemblance
to the young Hitler clones in Boys from Brazil. It’s TheOmen
for pop-psych millenarians and too lousy a movie to be worth dissecting in many
ways, but the message and timing are telling and the film could serve as a
“lurid parable” as a Guardian reviewer wrote, though not in the way the
reviewer probably intended it. At the end of the We Need to Talk About Kevin,
the fictional mom tells her incarcerated killer son how he played his cards in
court: “You managed it all so well. Tried as a minor, out of your head on
Prozac…You’ll be out of there in a couple of years.”

On the meaning of that particular line,
author Lionel Shriver is very clear:

Of course, Kevin is indeed sent to a
psychiatrist as an adolescent (which many of these
why-didn’t-the-parents-seek-professional-help readers fail to notice). But he’s
a wiley, manipulative little fellow, isn’t
he, and merely uses a prescription for Prozac to plan his post-Thursday
judicial defence—since Prozac has been identified as having a psychotic effect
on a small minority of patients.

Without quite denying that drugs might
cause a few rare psychotic outbursts, the author attempts to inoculate viewers
against increasing suspicions that prescription drugs might partly or even
greatly explain many modern mass murders. Even if it’s admitted that Prozac
didn’t work to curb a character’s violent impulses, the film implicitly sells
force and a horned devil—that those who are born evil must be identified and
preemptively managed. As another scathing review summed it up,

Probably viewed by all involved as an
important contribution to the nature/ nurture debate and a stark commentary on
the taxonomy of evil, the only thing this movie succeeds in doing is dumbing
down a complex issue to the point where it feels like an episode of Sesame
Street brought to you by the word ‘dysfunction’, the number ‘666’ and the
colour ‘red’…The problem with Kevin in that he’s such an unambiguous sociopath
that there’s no room for any kind of empathy – and it doesn’t take a degree in
psychiatry to know from about ten minutes in that he needs to be taken as far
away from civilisation as possible – maybe to Swindon – and put in a padded
cell on a diet of bread, water and really, really strong anti-psychotics.

Shriver mentions in the Bookgroup
interview that there are more dimensions in the overlap between “nature and
nurture” than in one or the other in terms of depicting psychopathology, though
she doesn’t seem to grasp that by “genetic,” mainstream geneticists aren’t
indicating “100% genetic” but “largely genetic” or “mostly genetic”—just as
Shriver implies of her fictional assassin. In an obviously coordinated press
junket for the film, UK autism researcher and pharmaceutical defender Simon
Baron-Cohen similarly hems and haws on the “nature/nurture” quandary only to
ultimately land, like Kevin’s author, on the “largely genetic”
interpretation in a Daily Mail review:

At zero degrees of empathy we find the
psychopath, such as Kevin. From everything we are shown in this gripping film,
psychopaths are born callous.

And yet, the film (like the science)
does not want us to settle too comfortably into the idea that the cause of
psychopathic low empathy is purely genetic. It hints, disturbingly, at the role
of psychological conflict in Kevin’s mother, about whether she is trying to
love him without truly loving him. The science confirms that environmental and
emotional factors do also play a role in the development of antisocial
personality disorder, but teasing apart cause and effect in such hard-to-parent
children is a tall order.

In people who end up as
psychopaths, brain regions connected with empathy are under-active. The science
also tells us that empathy is a complex skill, with several components. Two
major ones are “cognitive” empathy (the capacity to recognise what someone else
thinks or feels) and “affective” empathy (the capacity to feel an appropriate
emotion in response to someone else’s thoughts and feelings).

Psychopaths such as Kevin have zero
degrees of affective empathy (they just don’t care about someone else’s
feelings) but have excellent cognitive empathy (able to worm their way into
someone else’s mind by using their ability to figure out what someone else
might think, want or feel; able to manipulate others through deception).

The film doesn’t touch more established
“environmental” patterns of the deliberate and organized use of substances to
fuel violence, such as Hitler ordering the Luftwaffe to consume huge amounts of
methamphetamines, the forced drugging of abducted boy soldiers in Sierra Leon,
or Breivik’s deliberate doping in service of a violent political movement. This
is because the film seeks to generalize on a disconnected relatively recent form
of school shootings: non-ideological mass murder performed mostly by lone
perpetrators with no association to violent militant organizations, who most
often have no criminal background, make no attempt to escape and harbor no
specifically personal gripes against targets. Instead the film attempts to
offer a stand-in for group affiliation, organized ideology and personal
resentment in the idea that our entertainment culture is fomenting the deadly
nihilism of the demon seeds lurking among us. At one point Kevin mumbles out a
monologue peppered with teen-ironic emotional quotation marks:

You wake up and watch TV. You get in
your car and listen to the radio. You go to your job or your little school. But
you’re not going to hear about that on the six o’clock new. Why? Because
nothing is really happening… I mean it’s got so bad that half the time the
people on TV—in the TV—they’re watching TV. And what are all these people
watching? Huh? People like me. And what are all you doing right now but
watching me? You don’t think they would have changed the channel by now if all
I did was get an A in geometry?

But the character’s goth nihilism is no
more or less meaningless or untouched by history and context than Baron-Cohen’s
or the filmmakers’. The film’s villain isn’t alone in assuming the public is
hopelessly clueless and unworthy.

First, one of many things making the news media so hollow
and making the public so lost on the issues—and at risk—in the age of chemical
psychosis is, as Evelyn Pringle demonstrates, the lack of reporting on
prescription drug-induced violence and suicide. Even when the major media
presents a supposedly "balanced view" of the hunt for identifying
factors among populations "at risk" for violence, particularly in
terms of predicting random mass killings, prescription drugs receive no
scrutiny. So if the Kevin character conceivably knew anything
about the phenomenon, he would have had to perform pointed searches from the
previously mentioned scarce alternative media sources to generate a Prozac
defense. In doing this, he would have figured out that such a strategy would
never be allowed to succeed in what would be, in real life, a high profile mass
murder case. Only in a few obscure cases has the prescription defense
managed to even reduce charges.

But why haven’t students mass murdered
their classmates for as long as there have been schools if violent
psychopathology is “largely genetic”? Why didn’t these specific crimes
occur—moreover undergo a spike in rate— during eras when Dickensian
child-rearing, legal domestic violence and taking children to public executions
were commonplace if these zero-empathy-gene carriers only need a subtle
environmental jump-start?

Using Wikipedia’s
list of American school shootings as a guide but weeding out “classic”
crimes (the types of crimes that have always existed), a pattern emerges which
is illustrated in a simple table below. The table includes only mass
assaults by students against students and staff (qualified as attacks on two or
more students, or attacks on one or more student if coupled with an assault on
staff), or by adults not associated with a school assaulting students and staff
with no comprehensible motive, such as targeted revenge against a specific
individual for a perceived wrong, sexual, financial or ideological/militant
motives. If the attacker killed themselves and other bystanders or family
member in the course of the spree, these are included.

To explain why it was used for this purpose, the Wikipedia list is the only
publicly accessible “active” list (with new additions made and citations added)
and has the benefit of being slanted in the reverse direction of the argument
being made here: Wikipedia, known to be monitored
and edited by various industries which closely control certain entries,
does not focus on the prescription drug use of mass school shooters or may not
mention it at all, even when this information was confirmed after a particular
crime. The school shootings excluded are those such as targeted revenge attacks
by adults on adults or specifically targeted revenge assaults by students on
staff or students; “duels”; single suicides on school grounds; domestic or
sexually motivated murders of female students and staff (the most frequent type
of school shooting until 1966); family members seeking revenge for staff
physical punishments on students (also a seemingly common cause of school
shootings prior to 1966); deaths occurring in the course of staff physical
abuse of students; gang or mob-related violence and related ideologically
motivated militant terrorist attacks on schools, including Wiki's bizarre
inclusion of an act of war by Native Americans in 1764 without mention of
settlers' terrorist attacks on Indian children (presumably because Native
Americans did not refer to the education process as "school"). What
remains in the estimate are crimes in the “inexplicable” category of mass
school attacks which the film extrapolates on.

In 1966, Charles Whitman, the amphetamine-addicted Bell
Tower shooter who suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor and migraines— for
which he may have been prescribed other drugs—
set the precedent for a student committing a lethal mass school shooting against
students and staff. According to available information, prior to 1966,
there was a single lethal mass assault on students and staff by an adult staff
member of a school in the US and only one non-lethal attack by an adult with no
relationship to a school. Before 1966, there were no recorded mass assaults by
a student on other students and staff.

1960-1970: 3 mass assaults by students or recent former students on students and
staff; 1 assault on students and staff by adult with no relationship to the school.
22 dead (17 by Charles Whitman).

1970- 1980: 3 mass assaults by students or recent former students on
students and staff; 2 assaults on students and staff by adults with no
relationship to the schools. 15 dead

1980-1990: 5 mass assaults by students or recent former students on
students and staff. 5 dead

1990-2000: 15 mass assaults by students or recent former students on
students and staff. 42 dead.

2000- 2010: 5 mass shootings by students or recent former students on
other students and staff; 2 mass assaults on students and staff by adults with
no relationship to the schools. 72 dead.

2010- 2013: 5 mass shootings by students or recent former students on
students and staff. 41 dead.

While some insist that there’s been
“increased recognition” of mental illness, it would be strange to argue for
“increased recognition” of mass civilian murder or increased recognition of the
determination to commit it: The rarity of the earliest mass school shootings,
particularly those perpetrated by children on other children, meant they made
headlines around the globe. Today, hardly anyone is familiar with One Goh’s lethal mass attack in 2012. Med-madness
may not explain every crime, though the increase in non-ideological,
“inexplicable” mass killing incidents in schools would appear to mesh with the
availability of certain drugs more closely than it does population increase or
other societal advents, such as the availability of powerful assault weapons.
The sheer death tolls from separate attacks are clearly related to the types of
weapons used; but Charles Whitman managed to slay 16 with circa-1960
bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles. People in farming and mining
communities once had easy, undocumented access to explosives and there’s never
been a shortage of matches; but if these types of attacks follow the patterns
seen in other developed countries and had been included in the estimate, the
increase might appear even more staggering.

Although Prozac wasn’t FDA approved for
use in children until 2003, it was increasingly prescribed to school-aged
children from the time it was first marketed in the late 1980’s, followed by a
series of spinoff blockbuster selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and
second generation or “atypical” antipsychotics. Prior to that, stimulants and
first generation antipsychotics had been marketed for use in children since the
1950’s, followed by earlier generation antidepressants, Valium and other
“anxiolytics” and sedatives. To repeat, the number of children so disabled by mental
illness that they qualify for SSI and SSDI has risen 35-foldin
the past two decades along with the increase in prescription drug use.

Like Baron-Cohen, the creative team
behind We Need to Talk About Kevin is forced to tuck forgone conclusions
on the genetic roots of violence behind a feigned spirit of “exploration” as
they waffle around the total lack of science supporting the existence of a gene
or “set of genes” for violent criminality. It’s a leap of faith that they seem sure
science will eventually exonerate, but they hedge the bet for credibility.
Among the “environmental accents” dribbled through the plot, the film offers
enigmas for popular generalization: If someone harbors shallow political
criticisms of shallow media culture, they might walk away with a sense of
satisfaction that a glimpse of Kevin playing a video game with his dad advances
their pet theory that modern mass killings are caused by violent gaming and the
commercialized void. If they think junk food explains it, they can watch
pre-school Kevin angrily stuffing his mouth with neon orange cheese puffs in
one brief scene. Viewers who prefer the view that cold, selfish mothers cause
modern school shootings can find fodder watching Kevin’s mother struggle not to
hate or physically assault her malicious offspring. The happiest viewers will
be those who already leaned to the idea of the born psychopath. But if a viewer
believes that relatively new prescription drugs could play a role in the modern
advent of mass school killings, they’ll walk away with suspicions about the
film’s financial backing.

But the film didn’t go blockbuster and
the casting and unhappy hipster style suggest it was never intended as anything
other than an art house sleeper aimed at an influential, progressive boutique
audience who are predisposed, like Baron-Cohen, to accept the film’s dominant
genetic take.

As it happens, Kevin was co-produced by Steven
Soderbergh who was arguably at the top of his game when he made a radical shift
from championing consumer advocates (Erin
Brockovich) to attacking them in two films, Contagion and Kevin, which both play like extended public service
announcements for the pharmaceutical industry and public health.

Those who point out that Che, Soderbergh's biopic on
Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, hardly qualified as
pro-corporate would be missing the point. Though Guevara—who happened to be a
medical doctor— may arguably have been part of an inevitable counter-force
attempting to release Latin America from the clutches of North American
corporate slave labor, the Marxist and Cuban template for public health share
the same roots as that of the US—namely the French revolutionary model
generated by radical Jacobin anti-monarchists which sought to replace the
divine right of kings with the secular collective divinity of the state. Not
all countries' social health structures verge on utopian extremes; but as
reform psychiatrist Thomas Szasz writes in Coercion as
Cure, the "sacralizing of the state" occurs when
physicians are "converted from servants of their patients to agents of
public health."

Even Contagion, which had a more blockbustery early run
than Kevin, made only a fifth of the box office for Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen. The project
choices probably weren’t about the money. Instead Soderbergh’s recent spree
appears to be some kind of ideological fork strategy to correct growing public
rebellion against commercial science, public suspicion over regulatory
conflicts and, considering the common thread running between the two projects,
to adjust “misguided” public conceptions of autism.

What I need to find out, from someone like Malcolm
Gladwell, is how do people change their minds? What is the process by which a
person changes their mind about a deeply held belief? What’s the thing that
clicks over for them? I have no idea. Clearly people do change their mind about
things, but how does that work? Is it gradual, sudden? Is it through a peer?
What’s the source of the information?

What further confounds the culture-of-Ritalin school is
that A.D.H.D. turns out to have a considerable genetic component. As a result
of numerous studies of twins conducted around the world over the past decade,
scientists now estimate that A.D.H.D. is about seventy per cent heritable. This
puts it up there with the most genetically influenced of traits--traits such as
blood pressure, height, and weight. Meanwhile, the remaining thirty per
cent--the environmental contribution to the disorder--seems to fall under what
behavioral geneticists call "non-shared environment," meaning that it
is likely to be attributable to such factors as fetal environment or illness
and injury rather than factors that siblings share, such as parenting styles or
socioeconomic class. That's why the way researchers describe A.D.H.D. has
changed over the past decade. There is now less discussion of the role of bad
parents, television, and diet and a lot more discussion of neurology and the
role of specific genes.

In
Contagion, Soderbergh’s possible homage
to Gladwell’s conception of “epidemic” ideas and the “Mavens” and “Connectors”
who push them forward,public health officials and vaccine makers are defended
as martyred heroes. In keeping with Bernay’s and Gladwell’s methods of
doubt-implantation and herd-like view of “the masses,” the public are depicted
as hysterical fad-magnets who die in droves because they have forsaken true
science to follow a criminal charlatan who questions the safety of vaccines and
who suggests that vaccines cause autism.

In The
Tipping Point, Gladwell writes, “There is a simple way to package
information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All
you have to do is find it.” Jude
Law, the actor playing criminal “naturopath” Krumweide (German for “krummen”=
crooked; “weide”= field) claimed the character was based on
Lancet Paper author Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield, who lost his license to
practice medicine in politicized attacks on the study’s findings that novel
bowel disorders in autistic children might have an association with the measles,
mumps, rubella vaccine, was remotely exonerated when colleague John
Walker Smith won a reversal of the General
Medical Council’s verdict in British court at about the time the film was
released. In Contagion, Soderbergh
didn’t need to look very far to find irresistible packaging for his “good and
evil” idea-Mavens: in order to make the character instantly detestable, Law’s
bandy-legged, angry-Cockney characterization resembled, sort of confusingly,
not so much Wakefield as Brian Deer,
the reportedly pharma-funded
Murdoch freelancer who filed the initial viral complaint against Wakefield and
is named in an appealed libel
claim.

In his pop-think bestseller Blink, Malcolm Gladwell discusses
Simon-Baron Cohen’s conception of autistic “mind-blindness” and, in roundabout
terms, Baron-Cohen and Yale autism researcher Ami Klin’s views of autistic
empathy deficits. With the backing of Kevin, Soderbergh seems to finish
his Gladwellian tactical assault by attempting to counter the view that
pharmaceutical drugs have some association with modern mass murder. By
deduction, what remains is the idea that autism may relate to genetic
psychopathology.

At the start of the film, which follows
Kevin’s mother and father from courtship to parenthood, the screaming,
sleepless bringing-up-baby sequences are every inch the
experience of many autism parents, except “Kevin” is clearly “born with it.”
Whatever “it” is, it looks a lot like autism. The fictional mother, played by
Tilda Swinton, even asks a pediatrician— whose exam room is covered in huge,
grotesque posters of clowns— if toddler-Kevin is autistic but is reassured that
Kevin’s lack of “rocking behavior” rules out the condition.

Since rocking behavior isn’t a required
criterion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the scene could be
taken as a comment on clinical cluelessness. The clowns aren’t subtle and the
filmmakers are clearly presenting infantile autism as a kind of genetic
roulette spin that could somehow land on “violent psychopath.” Though most
autism families witness their healthy infants regressing into illness and
disability, the regression, illness and physical pain are excised, reinforcing
the “mystery” of the born killer and its supposed cold-blooded connection to
“genetic autism.” The dead giveaway that Kevin’s creators scoured the
deepest recesses of autism research for the killer’s
characterization is a moment when preschool Kevin gets the flu and, for a
fleeting time during his fever, normalizes into an affectionate and responsive
child.

Still, defining autism and sanctifying drugs
may not be the actual endgame of Soderbergh’s project choices. They’re “lurid parables”
for something larger.

Partly as a consequences of parsed and
filtered “murdertainment” depictions of mass murder and censored data on
adverse drug effects, the rate of consumers who take psychotropic medications
without full consciousness of risks continues to rise: one in ten adults and
children in the US take one or more psychiatric drugs including
antidepressants. 5-20% of these individuals will experience drug-induced
psychosis and mania according to the American Psychiatric Association,
accounting for 8.1% of all psychiatric hospital admissions.
Robert Whitaker factors that if 8% of the 10.741 million “patient care episodes”
reported by the federal government in 2000 were indeed prescription
drug-induced mania and psychosis, this could mean up to 860,000 Americans have
this type of reaction.

That’s 860,000 Americans who could, at
any given moment, go postal. It’s interesting that the term “going postal,”
according to Dr. Ann
Blake Tracy, entered the vernacular because of a
number of postal workers who experienced violent mania and
killed while taking antidepressants. If fear sells, there’s a great deal of
selling potential in every disaster that arises from these statistics as long
as the association to prescription drugs is obscured. But what exactly is being
sold?

The idea that schizophrenia is due at
least in part to a genetic predisposition is seen as an accepted fact in modern
day psychiatry. The acceptance of this theory is not only important for how
psychiatrists approach the research and treatment of schizophrenia, but also
has implications for the entire field of psychiatry…The genetic theory of
schizophrenia is frequently cited as evidence in favor of genetic
predisposition to other conditions; the thinking being that if schizophrenia is
genetic, then depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit
disorder and a host of other DSM IV categories must also have their roots in
problematic genes. (By the expression “genetic theory of schizophrenia,” we
mean the view that although environmental factors might be important, genetic
factors are equally if not more important). Scientists have spent countless
hours and numerous resources investigating the role of genes in certain
behaviors, but a specific gene has never been found for those disorders which
have no known neurochemical or neuropathological markers. in the case of
schizophrenia, several scientists have reported finding a “schizophrenia gene”
only to eventually retract their findings (e.g., Marshall, 1994; Sherrington et
al., 1988).

Before autism, schizophrenia was
central in attempting to demonstrate the genetic root of mental illness as well
as for generating public approval for forced institutionalization and treatment
due to public safety concerns. But the late Loren Mosher, while directing
schizophrenia studies for the National Institute of Mental Health, declared
that schizophrenia was clearly “environmental” after the agency completed
extensive analyses (Breggin, The War Against Children of Color, 1998; p.
54). Mosher made this statement to counter the agency’s press releases at the
time, which inexplicably reported the reverse of the NIMH’s actual findings.
Leo’s and Joseph’s review, like many other studies, found that the famed twin
and adoptive studies once thought to prove the genetic basis for the condition
not only didn’t provide support for the gene theory but undercut it. Jay
Joseph also authored The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity and the Fruitless Search for
Genes which questions the “twin method”
standard for emphasizing genetic cause of conditions over environmental. As
with autism, independent research is discovering immune
and toxic factors which may influence the
development of schizophrenia.

As far as whether drug treatment
actually improves conditions for schizophrenia or makes the public or patients
themselves safer, Whitaker points out that, according to historical documents
and institutional statistics, those with schizophrenia weren’t generally
more violent than typical members of the public prior to the invention of
mental health drugs. Whitaker further argues that mental illness, particularly
schizophrenia and other conditions involving delusional or erratic states have
been used to back fear-based marketing strategies to peddle drugs, a scheme
which is self-fulfilling because violent personality changes and suicidality have
been increasingly associated with the atypical and traditional antipsychotics
used to treat the disorder.

What’s more, Mosher also analyzed data
from two World Health Organization schizophrenia
studies from the 1970s which concluded that those not exposed to
prescription drugs typically had a roughly two to three fold increased rate of
recovery over those chronically exposed to psychiatric medications.
But Frau Koma isn’t interested in the small print. Neither is Paul
Steinberg of The New York Times, who has frequently weighed in on the
supposedly genetic origins of autism and
recently called for greater "risk management" of mental disability
(forced institutionalization and forced medication) in the wake of recent mass
shootings in a strangely contradictory op-ed entitled Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia
in which he poses schizophrenics as both less violent and more violent
than the general population:

...we have too much concern about
privacy, labeling and stereotyping, about the civil liberties of people who
have horrifically distorted thinking. In our concern for the rights of people
with mental illness, we have come to neglect the rights of ordinary Americans
to be safe from the fear of being shot — at home and at schools, in movie
theaters, houses of worship and shopping malls...The vast majority of people
with schizophrenia, treated or untreated, are not violent, though they are more
likely than others to commit violent crimes. When treated with medication after
a rampage, many perpetrators who have shown signs of schizophrenia — including
John Lennon’s killer and Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin — have recognized
the heinousness of their actions and expressed deep remorse.

The small print again: John Hinkley Jr.
had taken antidepressants and tranquilizers prior to his attempted
assassination; Mark David Chapman had abused a combination of prescription
drugs and LSD before killing John Lennon. Steinberg complains that the
Goldwater Rule prohibiting psychiatric professionals like himself from making
unauthorized assessments have a "chilling effect" on discussions of
violent crime.

After mass murders, our airwaves are
filled with unfounded speculations about video games, our culture of hedonism
and our loss of religious faith, while psychiatrists, the ones who know the
most about severe mental illness, are largely marginalized.

But psychiatric views haven't been
marginalized in regard to making the latest staple conjecture that mass
shooters may have some form of autism.

Various theories attempting to meld
criminality and autism have appeared since Hans Asperger subtitled his
discovery “autistic psychopathology.” In essence, Asperger meant extreme
disconnectedness but his choice of terminology has set off speculative
scrambles in every new generation of scientists bent on nailing down, once and
for all, the ever-elusive “crime gene.” In response to ongoing semantic
confusion, a team of Austrian researchers tracked the life histories of all 177
of Asperger’s original patients, searching for any statistical increase in
criminal activity. They found none. From No
increase in criminal convictions in Hans Asperger's original cohort:

Abstract: Hans
Asperger originally used the term "autistic psychopathy" to describe
his patients on the autism spectrum, leading to a possible confusion with
psychopathic disorder and delinquent behaviour. We conducted a penal register
search for 177 former patients of Asperger's clinic with a childhood diagnosis
of "autistic psychopathy" or features of the disorder in Austria. The
mean percentage of registered convictions was similar to that in the general
male population of Austria over the studied time period. A qualitative
assessment of offence types in Asperger's former patients suggests that the
nature of offences does not differ from that in the general population. In this
original cohort of Asperger's patients, convictions were no more common than in
the general male population.

But regardless, autism continues to be
drawn into the debate on modern crimes, from financial villainy to murder. Most
recently, autism has been linked to the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook
Elementary school in Newtown, Massachusetts on December 14th which
left up to 28 people dead—20 of them children under the age of 7. Sean Hannity of Fox News convened with Drs.
Marc Siegel and Keith Ablow on lack of empathy, autism and violent crime. None
appeared to be “chilled” by Goldwater or concerns about labeling and
stereotyping:

Sean Hannity:
Now we had heard reports—personality disorder. I had heard the term “autism”
today, Asperger’s syndrome… Obviously this kid, at this age, shooting his
mother, going in to shoot with abandon all these kids, obviously something’s
wrong. Would any of those conditions tell you that could happen?

Siegel:One thing’s for sure, Sean, he’s out of touch with reality at the time this
occurs. If he had something called Asperger’s, he may have had ongoing
meltdowns which are associated with violent behavior. That’s possible. It’s
possible he was on medication, that the medication wasn’t working, that he didn’t
have empathy, that he wasn’t relating well to others, that he had social
problems..But that still doesn’t explain everything. It’s also possible given
he’s the age of 20 that he became psychotic, that he lost touch with reality
completely and that he had some kind of delusional system going on that led to
this heinous crime.

Hannity:
Is it always a medical condition, I mean… I’m asking this as a question…If
someone is disconnected from reality, no sympathy, no empathy, no conscience,
no consciousness, no soul…There is human evil. I mean, someone can kill
innocent children like this, it seems to me that that is human evil.

Siegel:
You know Sean, I don’t know what Dr. Ablow’s opinion is on this and we’re going
to hear it in a second, but I personally don’t let people off the hook and say
‘this is a mental health condition, they’re not evil.’ I think the two can
coexist.I think there is an issue of evil here as well.

Ablow: Here’s what I
think. I think the final common denominator here is lack of empathy. You can’t
walk up to one child after another, kill that child and see each child fall to
the ground and slump over in his or her seat while maintaining any empathy. So
why can you lose human empathy? You could be delusional, schizophrenic perhaps,
and be working on a delusional system. I don’t know that to be the case
here, but you could be where you think “If I do this, I save the whole
world.” That’s one level of things. Secondly, sure, personality disorders can
do this, and there are other conditions that can do this, like drug abuse
combined with either a mood disorder or personality disorder or all three. But
listen, is it a mental illness? Of course it is, because that lack of mental
illness doesn’t come from nowhere. And in twenty years, Sean, I’ve never found
anybody who does anything like this who hasn’t been through hell him or herself
in a way that creates mental illness. Not genetics, it’s partly life.

Though limited information on the
shooter has been made available and little of it is substantiated, according to the Washington Post,
the Newtown perpetrator who killed himself after the attack has been identified
as 20 year old Adam Lanza, a socially awkward A student with possible
Asperger’s syndrome who had once attended Sandy Hook. Other news releases state
that Lanza had become depressed after his parents’ divorce and reportedly took
the atypical antipsychotic Fanapt.

Fanapt is FDA-approved for the
treatment of schizophrenia. Medical side effects of the drug include tardive
dyskinesia, male breast development, cardiometabolic damage and Parkinsonism.
Psychiatric side effects of Fanapt include akathisia, aggression, mania, delusion,
hostility, suicide.

The report that Lanza took Fanapt
originally appeared in the The New York Daily News which then excised
mention of the drug when it was disclosed that the source of the information
may not have been Lanza’s uncle but an imposter. The twist has confounded the issue, but
there are further reports that Adam Lanza took
medication, probably since the age of ten
at least and that Lanza’s mother was in the process of filing
for conservatorship of her son in order have him
committed.

If the court trend of sealing medical records in high
profile mass shootings continues, as with Columbine, Virginia Tech and Aurora,
the truth may never be confirmed and the hot potato for "cause" lands
on other targets. The only excessive concern expressed for privacy center on
perpetrators' pre-crime medical treatment and the only speculations being
chilled are over what prescription drugs they may have taken.

Following the Newtown massacre, several
seemingly legitimate sources within the killer’s family told the media that
Lanza had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, though newscasters don’t always hold
out for confirmation before guessing at a possible link between violence and
autism spectrum disorders. After a series of these premature proclamations,
some made within hours of several initial mass assault reports, it’s clear the
theoretical association between autism and criminality was simply lying in wait
all along. With the Connecticut tragedy, the pundits might have come up aces at
last. But in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting, Joe Scarborough of Fox,
an autism father himself, jumped the gun when he stated that James Holmes’
behavior smacked of autism.

Joe Scarborough speculated Monday that
James Holmes, the alleged shooter in Aurora, Colorado, might have been “on the
autism scale.” Holmes was behind the mass shooting
at a midnight showing of “Dark Knight Rises.” He shot over 70 people, killing
twelve of them. On Monday, Scarborough weighed in on the tragic event and said
that it was a “mental health issue.” The MSNBC host said he “did not want to
generalize,” but that he knew who was responsible as soon as he heard about the
shooting. “I knew it was a young, white male, probably from an affluent
neighborhood, disconnected from society, it happens time and time again,” he
remarked.“Most of it has to do with mental health. You have these people that
are somewhere, I believe, probably on the autism scale,” said Scarborough,
whose own son has Asperger’s syndrome. “I don’t know if that’s the case here,
but it happens more often than not. People that can walk around in society,
they can function on college campuses, they can even excel on college campuses,
but are socially disconnected.

Norwegian mass shooter Anders Behring
Breivik, who again quite clearly fit a more traditional profile of militant
mass murderer, has also been suppositionally diagnosed with Asperger’s
by an expert who had never interviewed nor treated Breivik.

Ulrik Fredrik Malt, a psychiatry
professor at the University of Oslo, said the 33-year-old Breivik was suffering
from Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome and narcissistic personality
disorder, but was likely not psychotic.The question of Breivik’s sanity is key to his ongoing trial. Though judges
are certain to find him guilty, they must decide if he was criminally sane or
not.Their decision would affect whether he gets mental treatment in a secure
psychiatric facility.Asperger’s is a developmental disorder on the autistic spectrum that often
is characterized by a lack of empathy. Tourette’s is a neurological disorder
marked by tics and verbal outbursts…Malt said Tourette’s could explain why Breivik has frequently smiled
inappropriately throughout the trial.Malt’s opinion is based on his observations of Breivik during his trial,
which started on April 16th, but he has not interviewed the defendant.Although Malt’s opinion would appear to have been along the lines of what
Breivik is trying to prove in court, the defendant lashed out against the
diagnosis.“I want to congratulate Malt for a very good demolition of my personality,”
he said.

Once a campaign manager for Nelson
Rockefeller’s presidential run, serial killer Ted Bundy—by all accounts an
infamous showman, master manipulator and adept liar— lured victims through
personal charm or by playing on sympathies and attracted serial killer groupies
during his trials. According to biographers, he was raised by his grandfather,
a “tyrannical bully,” who exposed Bundy to sadistic pornography as a child.
Bundy has been speculatively labeled as “manic-depressive,” “sadistic
sociopath” or, due to his infamous charisma, a psychopath. A Tampa, Florida
news station is currently in possession of the single witness recreation
drawing of Bundy’s execution by electric chair: he was smiling before the hood
was pulled over his head. Before he died, Bundy smirked and smiled
inappropriately throughout court proceedings, can be seen smiling in
photographs taken in between his 30 or more murders. So much for smiling
inappropriately as a diagnostic criterion— Bundy was never diagnosed with
autism or Tourette’s while he lived, though reports of Bundy’s timidity in
junior high have brought even Bundy in line for the current trend in
armchair “autism screening.”

In the midst of the Dec. 14 shooting in
Connecticut, the shooter’s brother, Ryan Lanza, has been reported saying that
his brother suffered from mental illness and was autistic. Unfortunately,
those in the mental health communities and autism communities do not get the
chance to mourn America’s loss of all these children but instead are doing what
they can to advocate for autism and other mental
health concerns before all of us with autistic children or adults of [sic]
autism are all labeled as potential murderers.

Perhaps more unfortunately, the label
has a particular tendency to stick to certain targets within the gap of
information surrounding modern mass murders and the labels may distract from
uncovering actual cause and stopping future crimes. Many mainstream advocacy
organizations, possibly in order to avoid being labeled as Luddites or to avoid
losing corporate sponsorship, steer clear of speculating on the pharmaceutical
association. This is true of some groups even when growing evidence of the link
between prescription medications and violence could provide enough reasonable
doubt in the common confusion between autism and violent criminality to slow
the adoption of damaging institutional policies against the disabled—or
vigilantism.

The blinkered approach neither mourns
the direct victims of the crimes nor does it prevent smear attacks which
threaten to add the disabled population to the roster of victims in the
aftermath. But to address any of it, advocates would have to first
acknowledge why the confusion persists.

Similar to the environmental injuries
strongly associated with the exploding rate of autism—whether the injuries are
fast-tracked by vaccine damage, exposure to drugs with similar cellular damage profiles
to mercury and other vaccine components, or due to an increasingly toxic environment— the adverse effects
of certain prescription drugs appear to be the great equalizers: no matter how
unique an individual started out, some will end up, post adverse event or
regression, displaying very similar external behaviors. For autism, there are
recognizable patterns of regression into stereotypies and injured social and
communication capacities across the spectrum which vary mostly by degree of
intensity. In the case of drug induced psychosis, many reportedly display
almost identical behavior and cognitions.

First-hand and expert accounts have
documented a senseless Stepford-wife aspect to drug transformations that seem
to involve a shedding of imagination and individuality and sudden convoluted
attraction to stock representations of aggression. The sudden, extreme fixation
on stock symbols is nearly a given among non-ideological modern killers in the
Western Hemisphere: formerly “nice” or “average” or merely “troubled” or
“bullied” kids—not to mention children with ethnic identities that might have,
at one time, made them victims of Nazi eugenics—developing an obsession with
the most culturally accessible, cookie-cutter representations of violence and
atrocity.

Young men and boys often surround
themselves with the fetishes of their favorite violent video games and films.
If there were any doubts that violent imagery increases aggression, the modern
military wouldn’t use digital battle simulation in training recruits to kill.
But there’s another issue of extreme, uncharacteristic and delusory
identification. Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, though he was half Jewish,
developed a sudden Nazi fixation after he reportedly began taking an unnamed
antidepressant. Finnish shooter Auvinen, being a bit closer to the
Russian border but paradoxically from a culture with historical resentment of
violent Russian expansionism, also wove Stalinism into the sudden onset
of his Celexa-induced, gun-worshipping violent delusions. But Auvinen’s focus also included the Western psychotic staple—Nazism.
As one Finnish drug critic put it when commenting on the Jokela school
shooting, “Now we know what put the ‘SS’ in SSRI.” Even the fact that Holmes—
who spent summers as a nondenominational counselor for Camp Max Strauss serving
underprivileged children—suddenly identified with “The Joker” wasn’t much of a departure from the
trend.

Anders Breivik is probably a red
herring within the assessment since he was long associated with neo-Nazi
organizations; his ideology, though repulsive, was relatively cohesive and
drawn from an organized militant movement. But for the majority of modern mass
killers, the focus on violent symbols might appear too random and disorganized
to amount to any structured ideology. According to other documented cases
of med madness, formerly agnostic or nonobservant individuals have developed an
overnight belief in the devil.

In Talking Back to Prozac,
Breggin describes the loss of individuality, loss of empathy and the
“robot-like” state induced by drugs which deactivate the frontal lobe. This
description of modern, drug-fueled mass killers has been as consistent as their
pre-drug histories were not:

Autism is sometimes clinically defined
by “lack of normal expressiveness,” fixations on particular icons (for
instance, Thomas the Train), and various degrees of repetitive speech
and choreiform movement which can sometimes give affected individuals a
“robotic” appearance. Long before studies showing a correlation between autism
risk and drugs in the water or drugs in pregnancy were published, with
the latter setting off speculations on future “SSRI
autism” lawsuits, psychopharmaceutical critics had
noted the “autistic-like” transformations of individuals under the influence of
psychiatric drugs, particularly antidepressants, amphetamines and
antipsychotics. But the point of the observations was not that the subjects had
been born this way. Instead it was understood that subjects were undergoing a
sort of “regression” from expressive normalcy to OCD, robotic behavior,
language and memory impairment, stereotypies, self-injury, paranoia and social
withdrawal. There’s a “before” and an “after.” It bears repeating that,
unlike the relatively rare schizophrenic “psychotic break” in eras before
prescription psychopharmaceuticals, the modern epidemic of psychosis more often
involves immediately identifiable mitigating factors and vastly higher and more
predictable rates of violence and suicide. Even the “before and after” has a
before and after.

It’s uncertain why this may be so,
though it’s known that certain psychiatric drugs impair mitochondrial function.
In The Silent Spring published forty years ago, Rachel Carson
summarizes a chapter devoted to the mitochondrial-toxic effects of modern drugs
and chemicals:

Some of the defects and malformations
in tomorrow’s children, grimly anticipated by the Office of Vital Statistics,
will almost certainly be caused by these chemicals which permeate our outer and
inner worlds.

There’s also the question of whether
symptoms of chronic toxicity, either subclinical or full-blown, could fast
track some children into biopsychiatric clutches in the first place. All the
same, even several mainstream, industry sponsored autism researchers and
organizations agree that autism in itself has no clinical
association to planned violence. Furthermore, individuals with autism are
vastly underrepresented among perpetrators in crime statistics and those with
mental or other disabilities are far more likely to be victims of crime than to
commit them. A Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that,

Persons age 12 or older who had disabilities
experienced an estimated 567,000 nonfatal violent crimes in 2010.

In 2010, the age-adjusted violent victimization rate
for persons with disabilities (28 violent victimizations per 1,000) was
almost twice the rate among persons without disabilities (15 violent
victimizations per 1,000).

In 2010, for both males and females the age-adjusted
rate of violent crime was greater for those with disabilities than the
rate against those without disabilities. The rate for males with
disabilities was 23 per 1,000, compared to 16 per 1,000 for males without
disabilities; for females with disabilities the rate was 26 per 1,000,
compared to 15 per 1,000 for females without disabilities.

The above estimations are likely to be
the tip of the iceberg. There’s no data available on categories of disability
(cognitive, physical or a combination) regarding disabled crime victims nor any
data on disabled child victims of crime under the age of 12. This is a problem
that Executive Director L.E.A.N. On Us and law enforcement response
specialist Carolyn Gammicchia attempted to address through yearly formal
requests for data gathering programs from the Department of Justice and the
federal Office for Victims of Crime since 2005. So far, no program has been put
in place and the holes in the data remain. Gammicchia’s organization did
uncover that 50% of disabled victims never seek legal or medical assistance, more
than half the crimes against the disabled are perpetrated against those with
more than one type of disability and that individuals with developmental
disabilities are 4 to 10 times more likely to be victims of criminal acts than
the general population— far higher than the estimated twofold risk of
victimization faced by the disabled population as a whole.

Cognitive injuries also open the door
to psychiatric abuse. This may have been true of John Ogdren
and Sky Walker Steuernagel. Would they
have had autism if not for environmental factors? Would they have killed if
they had not exposed to further environmental factors— drugs with black box
warnings for violence and suicide? Would Ogdren and Steuernagel have been
medicated if not for developmental disorders?

The answer to the last question is that
they might have been medicated even without serious disabilities. Many American
children are, whether this happens because, as Breggin wrote, a child is bright
and bored in a mediocre school, suffering from moderate lead or mercury
exposure, traumatic stress, closed head injury, simply due to minority status
or any number of reasons. But even though the cognitively disabled are
drugged at a far higher rate than the general population and would predictably
experience a proportionate increase in side effects, the vast majority of
drug-fueled killers had no remarkable preexisting mental disability. Though
several mass killers had come from troubled backgrounds, there’s no evidence
this was true of the whole. The common denominator for med madness is not
necessarily genetics or “partly life”: not autism, not preexisting conditions,
not even horrific childhoods.

Reading the comments’ sections of
articles on school/mass shootings, one sees members of the public conjecturing
on the rumored autism of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho. Reading comments
for articles about autistic individuals who kill, there are frequent references
to school shootings. And in the previously mentioned film We Need to
Talk About Kevin, the communal musings are brought together into a neat
little PR bomb.

What these two issues—mass murder and
autism— may have in common, mostly, is that they’re becoming systematically
blurred in public perceptions and there’s a method to it. Joe Scarborough’s remarks
on Fox were not off the cuff and neither were Sean Hannity’s. When
pharmaceutical front group Autism Speaks remained silent over Scarborough’s
statements, this was not an accident. There’s something in the message that’s
important to media sponsors and to mainstream public health authorities.

Along the same bipartisan lines
mentioned earlier, liberals are hardly immune from drawing sociopathic
parallels to autism. In an op-ed railing against conservative
self-centeredness, liberal pundit Paul Wallis recites a list of hateful
conservative views, including “Ethnic groups are criminals,” “The poor are
criminals,” “Obstructing any type of assistance to those who need it is
standard [conservative] procedure,” “Sick people only get sick to take money
away from the rich,” and then adds:

Can this possibly be considered
anything but an autistic viewpoint? Even the lying is based on the same
mentality as a 2 year old who thinks they can get away with anything.
Apparently anything which doesn’t directly benefit or relate to oneself isn’t
on the conservative radar. That’s autism, incarnate.

If there’s one area of bipartisan
agreement to be found in the partisan media circus, it’s that “autism
incarnate” is criminal incarnate.

Adriana Gamondes is a contributing editor to Age of Autism
and a Facebook page administrator. She and her husband commute between
Massachusetts and Florida and are the proud parents of recovering twins.

Disclaimer: Withdrawal from psychotropic drugs can often
be more dangerous than continuing on a medication. It is important to
withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs under the supervision of a qualified
specialist. Withdrawal symptoms are sometimes more severe than the
original symptoms or problems.

Comments

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Brilliant comedian and actor Robin Williams was reportedly being treated for depression at the time of his suicide, while his wife claims that his sobriety was intact. The media's response is to remind anyone who might be depressed to seek treatment, without telling the public that the treatment can cause suicidal thoughts. I wonder if it was the depression or the treatment that caused his death.

Thank you, Benedetta, I just saw your reply. I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you and your family have gone throught such horror. I hope full recovery may be within your reach.

Have you thought about the Andy Cutler protocol to get the mercury out? Do you know, I"ve been on it now since the beginning of October, and my sleep has become better. The horrible, permanent insomnia started Oct. 31, 1988, and has continued since then. It started about the same time as the double vision (optic neuritis), a two years before the extreme dizziness and numbness in the left side of my face that was diagnosed by MRI as MS in Sept. 1990. Even a few months ago I was spending $100 a month on different sleep blends from the health food store, valerian, kava kava, scullcap, passion flower, ashwagandha, and taking fifteen or twenty a night in addition to the over-the-counter sleeping pills I took (no prescription sleep meds in maybe ten years). Three droppersful of kava kava tincture a night, it's a strong sedative. When I became tolerant to taking two sleeping pills a night, I'd have several bad nights of not taking them till they would work again. It was literally an unending hell which went on for years, and I was usually either almost dead in the day from lack of sleep or dead from being heavily sedated. Now, after three months of the low-dose chelation three days a week, I've gone for a week taking only sleeping pills several times, no need for herbal capsules or kava kava. I've slept well several times this week without taking anything. Last night I slept well for seven hours without taking anything. I'm convinced that it's the getting the mercury out that's doing it, and I'll just keep on doing it until I've been well for a year.

Have you thought about trying it? Info on ordering the chelators in small 25 mg. capsules at regardingcaroline.com

C.A. Parker
Yes, I read that too- the Yates were advised that she should not have any more children for she was prone to postpartum depression. Once again Rusty should have re-directed her to other things besides more kids. The mental health issues though - they may not have understood the full implications. I think that if Rusty had already seen it - he should have understood it better (my opinion). She was the one with impaired thinking and he was the man of the house and I don't mean biblical; I mean mental health wise. I thought the alone for an hour incident was just a horrible mistake -if it was something done every day on purpose!! Well ,one more injustice by the system- he should be in jail with her for reckless homicide. He divorced her and remarried within - a year?? Maybe it was two years.
I would like to correct what I said earlier. I did not remember correctly about the time I had postpartum depression. It was not (1) month later. but three or four months later after giving birth to my daughter and after I had gone through a few yeast infections too.
My daughter reacted to all of her DPT shots- after her fourth she ended up with Kawasakis as a child. Her fifth - at five years old -- she passed out with 105 temp and rapid breathing.
When she turned 14 she had trouble with her pituitary and was put on birth control to control her periods. She was more than just moody - she was deeply angry and was put on a mild anti-depressant too.
In her 20s the Insurance company would not pay for her mild anti depressant, but would for protzac. She gained 100 pounds on her very slender frame within a year -. She tried to get off of it on, that turned out to be rather dangerous.
She has two BS degrees -learning disability was never an issue. The second BS degree for nursing led to Hep B shot series while in school. After the third one she developed extreme stiffness, high sed rates, high ANAs . Within a year she was forced to take a flu shot and developed deep depression again and her regular doctor upped her protzac. She went on a six month long mania (I am like RUSTY HERE - CLULESS) and then psychosis.
I found in her room - she had cut herself her - esp her hand pretty bad with her nurse's scalpel trying to get imaginary bot worms out of her.
But she is now doing good -- not great - she is working and is well respected at her work. She is on Lamictal a seizure medication for seizures during her sleep and is also a mood stablizer. And a low dose of protzac.

I wish that was the end of all the vaccines but it not. She sliced her leg this fall and had to have stitches. I told her about the tetanus being a DTaP - she told them tetanus only but recieved the DTaP. She coughed for six weeks with a whooping like cough and has been sick all Fall.

I could not believe she did that -but she said she was scared of tetanus. Sigh- I am no longer scared of tetanus as I am of psychosis.

Benedetta,
I think probably Andrea Yates should be regarded as a horrible anomaly. I looked her up: she went off her medication without permission (!) before conceiving the last child. But I think she was on and off meds for a long time. One doctor told her and Rusty not to have another child, that it would certainly exacerbate her psychosis. So two months later went ahead and conceived the last baby, Mary. Another doctor told Rusty not to leave her alone with the children. But he wanted to leave her alone with them for an hour a day, to increase her independent functioning. Why was he not tried as an accessory to murder? She planned the murders for some time. She waited until Rusty left to fill the bathtub, as she was afraid he would interfere with her plan. She locked the dog in the garage so he would not try to rescue the children. She completed all the murders, one at a time, in the hour gap between Rusty leaving and Rusty's mother arriving to help with the children. In her first trial, the jury just did not think she was crazy enough to qualify for the insanity defense, as evidenced by her "rational" steps in carrying out the murders. Could her having the baby and going off the prescribed meds (at this moment I'm assuming that they helped control her symptoms), not be considered sort of like someone who drives when drunk? They know they're drunk, got drunk knowing they were going to have to get home somehow, and drove home knowing on some level that they were impaired? But no one quibbles with throwing the book at DWIs who cause innocent deaths.

Again, I don't disagree with your saying most such people are easily redirected. But I think we all need to think about what appropriate measures would be to try to prevent the occasional horrible tragedy. Maybe lock people like Adam Lanza in his room at night, and have a weapon at the ready for when the door was opened? Many people lock their autistic children in their room at night, to keep them from wandering away and other mischief. I read yesterday that President Obama had introduced a bunch of new gun control bills, I sure hope they ban assault weapons entirely. And I know murders can be carried out with knives, and so on. There have been a lot of knife murders by the mentally ill in Japan recently. But a knife murderer wouldn't be able to kill a lot of people before being stopped.
Drugs, guns, and vaccines have all way passed the line of reason, and I hope there are enough genetically normal people when all this clears to continue a healthy human race.
Benedetta, may I ask what happened to your daughter? I know your husband was damaged by a tetanus vaccine, as I was. My daughter has autism, but has never been violent. She is, as you say, easily redirected.

DENVER, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- A woman whose husband was killed in a Colorado massacre has filed a lawsuit accusing a psychiatrist of failing to use "reasonable care" in treating the suspect.
Chantel Blunk is taking legal action against the University of Colorado, Dr. Lynne Fenton and five other defendants whose names were not mentioned in the suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Denver, The Denver Post reported."

I am a steady, even tempered person.
I am not prone to the blues
Let me tell you it was down right painful.

I think it involves blood sugar and it may have something to do with the thyroid.
It went on for two months.

You know how people are all saying - Oh, she was a new mother, they just moved and she was depressed about this or that --
Well I am here to tell you that I blamed nothing for my depression.
I was delighted to be a mother, I loved my husband deeply, we had moved but it was a new beginning. It was depression without a cause and it would have been scary if it was not so painful.

what brought it on.
I have theories.
After a DPT shot - I think my sugar was out of whack - for years- even five years later.
My pregancy went an extra month - I would not o into labor and I had an idiot for a gyno - which the last week I carried her ended up with Preeclampsia
It has a physical cause.

Interesting point about Yates. I think I'd read she was physically abused by her husband prior to the breakdown and saw a study that postpartum depression is more likely among battered women. But those circumstances aren't true of everyone who goes nuts on meds and there are a lot of otherwise upstanding families who are affected by these tragedies. Someone mentioned a formerly happy family who lost a child who'd taken antidepressants for temporary insomnia.

I don't think the onus for side effects should be put on families who once simply had faith in doctors or didn't catch on that an adult child was caught in the gears. The more you read about the massive amounts of funding that was poured into PR and tobacco science to defend these drugs, the more it makes sense that people simply did not know what they were getting into. And once in it's so hard to get out.

We're all haunted by "should haves" in the pharma age. At 18 I had absolutely no idea what these meds could do, so I'm stuck with the memory of my last, post-grad encounter with a very dear friend from high school during which she told me that she had been "diagnosed with depression" after a break-up with a long term boyfriend but that it had "turned out" she was really "bipolar" and she mechanically rattled off all the meds she'd been progressively prescribed. My formerly happy and expressive friend looked gray and expressionless. When she made uncharacteristically judgmental remarks towards me, I simply wrote her off. At that age you're only beginning to learn about people and the world. I thought she had simply turned mean.

One by one this happened to people I'd known from high school. The terrifying thing is that they were all seeing the same psychiatrist and all under the same circumstances-- that first college break-up or bout of homesickness in an out of state school or especially gaining the "freshman ten" which led to use of the now withdrawn drugstore diet aids. All those now-withdrawn 80's and 90's drugstore diet pills and fad diets are probably under-recognized as "gateways" for ending up in a psychiatrist's office.

What especially haunts me is that at the time I didn't understand the irony that the meds can make some people seemingly "unlovable" so quickly that anyone who might otherwise be motivated to help them might become exasperated and is tempted to turn their backs. These people were technically adults and even if their parents had known what was happening(impossible since almost no one knew) they might not have been able to stop it. It was like losing people to a cult. But because it was being perpetrated by the medical establishment, it's not as if anyone could have gotten their loved ones into rehab for drug dependence being fostered by the state. There's still no therapeutic system for helping prescription-injured people, only hard-to-find alternative resources which have their hands tied by lack of funding or even harassment by pharma-embedded state authorities, very much like the vaccine injury equation.

Benedetta,
You're right, I really don't understand psychosis, I've never seen it personally, only read about it, I was never around my uncle much. I would have to say, though, that people who are psychotic, or might become psychotic because of the possible side effects of the drug they are on, should be interned for as long as the possibility of psychotic behavior exists, in order to protect the innocent. I guess that would mean billions set aside to start a facility in every neighborhood, so it gets back to how much you think the innocent lives are worth. It might mean going back to the way things were before vaccines and before psychotropic drugs: vaccines really haven't made the world better once you take into account all the lives destroyed by them, and it might be we need to do the same thing with the drugs. Make it a very serious intervention, and one very disruptive of the working lives of those who take them. Don't let anyone give the impression that it's a quick, easy fix.

Adriana
It is hard - all hard and guilt ridden that I have had to accept what you are saying as ture.
We have had to fight deep depression. - I am referring to my daughter.
And I know good and well it is a residual effect from vaccines

Yet, You are right the medication she is on - to fight the depression - she was given more.
She tried to get off of them without telling us and it was bad; then after more vaccine injuries she was given more.

So we have two injuries going on here.
She was taken off of it and she sat around with big tears coming out of her eyes. She knew it was not saddness because of the way thing are but chemical.

They put her back on - at a low dose. Even now and then she has bouts of depression.

I wish I knew more about the Atkins diet and supplements when she was younger and we could have maybe come out the winners instead of the losers.

C.A Parker - I have looked psychosis square in the face.

You have no idea that something like this can exist, untill you see it up close and personal.

Your room mate I agree with you - I would have loved 10 kids, but the two kids I had was sick and it was not fair - we thought to bring more in the world -- esp if we could not afford them. As for Yates it had nothing to do with how she felt, nor did it matter what she felt.

If you are looking for a villian in the Yate's story look no further than other adults in her life that let her down.

Her husband well knew she was in the state of psychosis - he needed to go to work and left - not waiting for "I forget" His mother or her mother-- who did not show up.

When this *ss *ole left before some one came to watch her, he well knew she was in psychosis - she had been in psychosis for a while.

Also blame the medical people - because he had called and called to get help. He should have done more - if he found he couldn't even work.

Would you leave a 1 year old on it's own before the baby sitter showed up?

That is what he did - except he left with such in charge of five kids.

And hasn't the Age of Google also changed everything? Now everyone has access to data on the side effects of drugs. I know most people don't take advantage of it, but isn't it now clearly their responsiblity to do so? If you say your doctor recommended it, aren't we now in an age in which doctors who tell you to vax, take drugs, or have such-and-such a procedure done, are in a category similar to that of the commender in the My Lai massacre? It was found that carrying out the immoral instructions of the military officer was not an excuse for his men to rape and murder, and they were held to be accountable for their actions.

Thanks, Adriana. And alcohol is much the same. Yesterday on the news they said that the football player who killed his girlfriend and himself last month had a lot of alcohol in his blood. Heaven knows that a lot of people kill their partners in jealous rages even when they're not under the influence, but alcohol lowers the boundary around transgressive behavior in much the same way that drugs can. But the law absolutely doesn't allow alcohol to be a defense against deaths caused while under the influence, whether in DWIs or as domestic violence. If adults drink or take drugs, they are considered responsible for what the alcohol or drugs may permit them to do, because they took the intoxicant based on their free will. It is true that people under eighteen may be compelled by their parents to take the drugs, and that may place responsiblity for their actions on the parents. It is certainly true that it must be written into law that the person responsible must read and understand all the possible side effects before taking the drug. No one should be permitted to say that they didn't know what the consequences could be, just as no one, not doctors, not patients, not anyone, should be allowed to say that they didn't know the devastating consequences vaccines often have. And it should be true that kids over ten must give their free and informed consent before taking the drugs, it's ridiculous that seventeen-year old be placed in the same category as seven-year olds. Does anyone really think that the seventeen year old who partipated in the New Delhi gang rape is less guilty than the others?

Yes, I think it came from resentment. I think Yates had had a fantasy ideal of herself as an earth mother, surrounded by a large number of well-behaved, adoring children. The reality of having four sons under the age of seven and a baby daughter turned out to be much more grueling, thankless, and unending work than she had anticipated, and I think she indulged in fantasies of how to treat these rowdy, inconsiderate limbs of Satan in the way that they "deserved". I think our thoughts have enormous power, and if people don't learn to channel their thoughts to be loving and productive, subordinating their egos when there is a greater goal that requires it, then they can easily become monsters, even enacting their fantasies if drugs blur their reality. I don't think the drugs are what produced the fantasies to start with. Yates then laid out their bodies lined up on a bed covered with a white sheet, having successfully objectified them as an attractive visual image.

I had a roommate in college who was very Catholic, she was one of ten children, and her family had split off from the Catholic Church to follow Bishop Lefevre (sp?). She later married when she was over thirty, and, since she and her husband didn't use birth control, quickly produced six children. She was overwhelmed and extremely unhappy, and told me that if she had known she was going to have six children, she would never have gotten married. That shocked me quite a bit: in a severely overpopulated world, I would never have had six children, regardless of what the Church said, but if I had, I would have loved them very much, and told myself that every year that passed, and they pass quickly, brought me nearer to the end of the grueling phase of childrearing. And her children were all normal, personable, and loving. How could she wish that she had not had them? I thought it very much contradicted the love of God which presumably had led to their birth, and was very immature.

Yates was on meds. An Associated Press story reported, 'An antidepressant that Andrea Yates had been taking before she drowned her five children in 2001 has recently been found to possibly increase the risk of homicidal thoughts, according to a medical watchdog group that says Effexor's manufacturer has not warned the public. "Homicidal ideation" was added last year as one of the drug's rare adverse events on Effexor XR's label and on Wyeth's Web site...A month before the murders, her daily dose had increased to 450 mg, twice the recommended maximum dose, Dolan said. Her lead attorney, George Parnham, has criticized the amount of medications Yates was prescribed before the children's bathtub drowning deaths. He said Wyeth should have publicized information about the possible connection between Effexor and thoughts of murder, but he said that will not affect Yates' case.'

She clearly had a breakdown. But would she have gone to the extremes she did without the addition of drug induced psychosis? Readily available data for parental murders of children sort of trails off in the mid-90s after a 100-fold spike which overlapped the availability of certain medications. Most weren't postpartum related but the murder of older children. Yates appeared to be part of a statistical trend.

Suspension of REM sleep and "waking dreams" are associated side effects with some of these meds so that could play a role.

C I Parker
look up psychosis.
It still is hard to figure out what it is from the descriptions.

Are there in good links to some one that describes it from a personal view point?

I think it is like dreaming and yet up and walking around and actally doing.
Dreaming is a way to face our most deepest fears and worries - so we do not control our dreams.
Yates you think came from resentment?
What about just a dream that went way wrong.

Lots to think about here. I looked up deaths by car accident and there has been a decrease in fatalities every year since 2006. There were also several years of declining deaths in the 90s. I've just started reading about these issues. From what I have found the suicide rate per capita has been very consistent (except for military population) for a long time.

Bob and Cia, thanks so much for the responses. You both bring up some good issues.

A film which is almost never discussed in relation to med-madness but should be is Jacob's Ladder, about a group of soldiers who are slipped a drug during combat to test its effects on aggression and kill-capacity. The experiment goes very wrong, the soldiers have partial amnesia about the heinous things they did on the med and suffer years of flashback hallucinations. No one tells them it was the drug, so they all fear they're going insane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96-hRYFfSYI

Not to say that Prozac murders are a case of Manchurian candidate plots, but the point is that some meds are known-- on their own-- to cause a formerly decent person to commit heinous acts that they never would have without the drug. Formerly law abiding, nonviolent people without preexisting mental disorders have killed themselves and others on drugs given to them by pharmacy mistake, which lends to the argument of reform psychiatrists that sometimes it's "just the drug"-- not underlying "evil" or preexisting mental conditions. That seems to be an idea that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around. None of us like to think that it could happen to any of us if simply slipped the wrong pill, which is what the upcoming "Part 3" is about.

For example Breggin has countered a lot of enthusiastic and very scientific-sounding spin that Eric Harris was "born evil" or had been abnormal prior to taking an antidepressant. Breggin's research in the course of an injury suit against the drug maker filed by one of the Columbine victims made him conclude that Harris had been a nice kid before taking the wrong drug. And as a kid, he had no legal informed consent. Breggin does not conclude the same thing about the army psychiatrist who committed mass murder. Hassan not only had theoretical access to risk data but had "field experience" and had treated people with these drugs himself, knew the effects and took them anyway.

Sort of repeating the bit on Breggin's discussion of relative guilt, he makes the case that at some point in the future, consumers may be informed enough that if they take the meds and go ballistic, they'll be responsible. But he point is that, unless someone has special access to data on suicidal and homicidal side effects of certain drugs, we're not "there" yet as far as "average Joe" public understanding of risks. It's debatable whether Holmes had "special access" to risk data, particularly since the closer you get to the heart of psychiatry/neurology in elite institutional and academic circles (where Holmes was situated in his grad studies) the thicker the tobacco science and the *faith* in it becomes. Holmes also had no field experience.

Figuring out relative guilt in the case of drugs that can and have driven formerly sane and law-abiding people to kill isn't simple.

What are you people talking about? If a person's perception, what they hear, see, feel and think, is wrong, isn't in keeping with reality, and the person has no idea that his perception is screwed up rendering him defenseless against what his deranged mind conjures up, and the person commits a crime under those conditions, then the person is just as much a victim as those he hurts. A deranged mind can plan all kinds of things, so in Holmes' case, saying that it was premeditated based upon how his apartment was booby trapped and therefore he couldn't have been deranged, doesn't cut it. We also have no proof that it was he who booby trapped his apartment. Who or what is to blame for Holmes'condition is the question - understanding his condition is critical to being able to apply justice to this and the other cases and it is absolutely essential to preventing future violence. I have all along had a gut feeling that Holmes got mixed up with the wrong people. I couldn't tell you who those people are, whether it was experimentation he engaged in as part of his Phd (remember, in the last century, our government covertly slipped LSD to soldiers to see what would happen - who knows what they're up to in this century), or he was given drugs along with or instead of psychotherapy when he sought help for personal problems, or he became psychotic and then didn't get appropriate treatment or the drugs made him worse, or some other scenario. I can tell you this though, for sure, there are those who know exactly what happened, and we aren't being told. Those who know want the public to fabricate their own theories. They want the public to believe that no one else was responsible. They want the public to hope Holmes burns in Hell. That's exactly what they want, and if the public falls into the trap, the truth will never come out and whoever and whatever is behind the poisoning of Holmes' mind will get away with it. Remember too, the mass shooting in Arizona, of another supposedly lone crazy man that we know nothing about, where a Congresswoman was shot. And then Adam Lanza - again, we are told nothing - led to believe that he didn't know anyone and he was a lone gunman. If the media was giving the public full disclosure, if we were told as much as would be expected, that might be different. But the omission of basic facts in all these cases is very suspicious. When we see OUR young men, our sons and brothers, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, going berserk, committing unthinkable crimes, instead of distancing ourselves from them, instead of passing judgement without having any facts, we need to ask harder questions and demand answers. I would like to point out too, that there are few conditions more painful, more hellish, than having a deranged mind. It may be that all three of these men were just angry, out of control, super violent, criminals in full control of their faculties. It doesn't appear that way and we don't have any evidence of that being the case.

Wow, Adriana, you and AoA have reached a new peak of excellence in reporting! I'm going to send links to this to everyone I know.
And your post was great, Bob, I had been worried that maybe readers might take offense at my posted wish the other day that Adam Lanza burn in hell, and was relieved that you expressed a desire for the Aurora killer to rot in hell for eternity. I think these guys are Evil, and the use of drugs, as I said the other day, does lower the boundaries that normally prevent psychopathic murders. But the fundamental problem is these people's resentment and hatred of everyone around them, so as not to take responsibility for their own failings, their own unwillingness to take the first step to overcome their disabilities by reaching over the bound of their egos to touch the lives of others. Instead, a massive, explosive "Non serviam!"

Was hoping to hear defense attorneys representing the cretin who murdered innocent people attending a movie in Colorado .. at least mention his prior "mental health medication" history .. in recent pre-trial hearing.

Nope .. nothing .. nada .. not a whisper of what prescribed "medications" he was using on the day of ..or .. just prior to his despicable act.

Don't get me wrong .. I don't want this information so this dirtbag can claim it as a "defense" for what he did .. as far as I am concerned .. he can rot in hell for eternity.

However .. I think the information regarding his prescription "treatment" is critical so "independent sources" can ascertain if the widespread and growing body of evidence Adriana has written about .. that clearly indicates .. these medications may be SIGNIFICANTLY "linked" with these types of homicidal rage.

After all .. if his blood tests following his immediate arrest showed irrefutable evidence that he acted while under the influence of illegal drugs .. such as .. "crack", "angel dust", "meth", "LSD", "alcohol". etc .. those substances would be considered "contributing factors" for the jury to consider .. but .. in all likelihood .. the jury would still .. correctly so .. find him GUILTY of FIRST DEGREE MURDER.

If we are not allowed to know WHAT drugs may have been found in his system .. how in God's name are we supposed to prevent such violent homicidal rages in the future?